Health and Sport Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Official Report 479KB pdf

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Healthcare Improvement Scotland and Scottish Public Services Ombudsman

Agenda item 3 is consideration of how we proceed with the evidence that we received from Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman on 15 January this year. Paper 4 contains a summary of the evidence and some options for future work.

I invite comment from committee members to inform our course of action.

I thank the Scottish Parliament information centre for its summary of key points of evidence and for its hard work on that. However, it is only fair to put on the record that the points do not reflect a prioritisation by the committee of the most relevant points; they are just an attempt by SPICe to capture much of the information.

I will read a couple of the points and provide a couple of additional points for the public record. The SPICe summary states in relation to Health Improvement Scotland:

“HIS acknowledged a need for two or three more inspectors but highlighted the need to utilise the existing expertise within the NHS”.

I am delighted to put on the record that Health Improvement Scotland said during the evidence session that there are current plans to put in place two or three inspectors to support its work. It is therefore not just a case of saying that HIS does not have enough inspectors, because there are plans in that regard. I think that it is important to put that on the record.

Page 3 of the SPICe summary states:

“When questioned on the current standard of care, HIS responded that ‘the baseline in Scotland is reasonably high’”.

It did indeed, but just before that comment Dr Coia said:

“Scotland is a world leader in some aspects of healthcare. In the acute sector in particular, day surgery—to take one example—has mushroomed in Scotland in a way that is a credit to the Scottish health service.”—[Official Report, Health and Sport Committee, 15 January 2013; c 3109.]

Therefore, HIS did say that the baseline was reasonably high, but it also used the expression “world leader”.

I just wanted to put those two points on the record and to stress for anyone who might view the SPICe summary as a committee summary of the evidence session that it is not. However, SPICe has been very helpful in trying to draw together some of the main points that were raised. I hope that what I have said is helpful for the committee.

I found the two evidence sessions on 15 January very interesting. I think we should consider repeating the sessions on an annual basis so that we can pick up on some of the points with the witnesses involved.

On the next steps suggested in the options in paper 4, I think that we could write to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing and also pick up some of the issues with him in a general question and answer evidence session at a committee meeting. Therefore, we can write to him in the first instance, await a response, and, if issues arise from that, we can pick them up at the question and answer session.

We would need to agree on what points to raise with him in writing. Would it be the cabinet secretary who would deal with the issues raised during the 15 January evidence sessions, or would it be the Minister for Public Health, Michael Matheson? I think that we need to get clarity about where the responsibility lies in that regard, because that might affect our judgment.

Given that the committee might have six or seven different opinions about what should go into a letter, perhaps the clerks can liaise with you, convener, and the deputy convener to produce a draft letter that could be presented for approval at the next committee meeting or be circulated by email to members for approval. We could do it that way rather than discuss it here just now, given that we might have several different opinions about what should and should not go in the letter.

That may be a solution. However, I am concerned that we would start debating the convener’s or deputy convener’s interpretation or weighting of the evidence taken on 15 January, which Bob Doris alluded to earlier. It is probably simpler to have a discussion with the minister responsible and have them put on the record what they believe are the important aspects of the evidence that we heard. I do not think that a letter would help, because I think that we would end up back here after the letter anyway. What do you think?

If the view is that we should just have the cabinet secretary or the minister—if we decide that it is the minister who is more directly responsible for the issue—before the committee for the question and answer session, that is fair enough.

Agreed.

I would be fine with that as well. The issue is whether we should raise points with the minister or cabinet secretary in correspondence and see whether the response addresses those points suitably before deciding to get them before us, or whether we simply go straight to having them before us. That is just a process point, but I will go with what the committee decides.

To try to be helpful, we can send the cabinet secretary or the minister, as appropriate, a copy of the summary of evidence paper and what Bob Doris noted on it so that they can comment on the evidence, with a view to having them before us to discuss it. Would that do it?

Why do we not just send the cabinet secretary or the minister a copy of the Official Report of the evidence session?

That is publicly available, so I would expect that their officials have read it. The SPICe paper is a summary of the Official Report of the evidence session.

I acknowledge what members have said, but my take on the clerks’ options—and where I was going with that—is that we would have questions on the SPICe paper as part of a wider Q and A session that we are planning to have with the cabinet secretary. I did not take it to be the case that we would simply pull in the cabinet secretary or the minister on the specific evidence session addressed in the SPICe paper; rather, I thought that we would wrap up some of the points in the paper in the wider discussion that we hope to have at some point in the year.

The paper refers to our having

“planned ‘ask the Cabinet Secretary’ general evidence sessions.”

The committee has spoken about that. From my recollection of the Official Report of the evidence session and from reading SPICe’s summary of the evidence, I do not know whether we have enough information to sustain one single evidence session on this specific topic; rather, it should be part of a wider discussion with the cabinet secretary or the minister.

In that case, I suspect that the sensible thing to do would be to send the SPICe summary to the minister or the cabinet secretary—whoever the relevant Government person is—and ask for a written response from them. Depending on what is in the written response, we will mop up any additional questions with the cabinet secretary, or we will look to other options, which could be for a minister to come to the committee. By doing that, we would not rule anything out. It seems a straightforward way to progress.

Are members okay with that?

Members indicated agreement.

That concludes the formal part of our meeting. However, I ask members to stay behind for about 10 minutes to discuss the Parliament day and the issues that we were not able to cover in the private pre-meeting briefing.

Meeting closed at 12:23.